HI Doughnut Awards

Our village Feast has always provided an opportunity to celebrate and give thanks for the best of our community. As we come out of lockdown, the Parish Council, Council of Churches and HI Friends, who came together to form our street network during the pandemic, would like to launch the HI ‘Doughnut’ Awards. A chance to show your appreciation for those who have worked tirelessly to improve the social foundation or environmental sustainability of our villages. We hope many of you will share your lockdown stories. Any questions to info@histonfeast.co.uk

The deadline for nominations has bee extended to Saturday 18th July at 12 midnight. 

Due to the cancellation of many of our Feast Events the awards will be presented as soon as COVID guidelines are removed and we can find a date everyone can get together.

Thank you for:

• Making packaging-free, sustainably produced products available to sell in the village.
• Realising there was a greater need for help during lock-down and setting up things like food pallets and help networks for individuals in need during the tough times.
• Recognising People! Madam modem. Professor compressor.
• Thank you for organising a street web group so we could all keep in touch during this difficult time.
• Getting my daughter’s football back up whenever it was allowable, thereby giving the team the opportunity to exercise and interact safely which has done wonders for an age group that has had so much disruption over the last 15 months.
• An outstanding contribution from a teenager during the pandemic. For rebuilding laptops after and donate them back to those most in need. A truly selfless act of kindness.
• Being a great local business, great customer service, innovation and always going the extra mile. For delivering some amazing creations and cheering up many lock-down Birthdays.
• Keeping team spirit alive with weekly video challenges to practise skills, these snippets took a lot of effort and creativity.. The result was keeping the team connected which helped all their wellbeing – they even just gained promotion this season.
• Managing your football team and taking on another team that had folded. For giving hours of your time to get the team together outdoors and giving great enjoyment to many boys who missed out on so much during lockdown.
• Delivering papers all through lockdown and especially in the dark days of the winter months when many vulnerable people could not go out.

The benefits of a doughnut!

Most of us love a doughnut, don’t we? Well, there is reason to believe that a doughnut could transform us into a community that lives well and nourishes our environment.

In 2017 a book was written. It began to cause a little stir, then a bigger ripple, and now its message is transforming the way cities around the world treat their people and their environment.

‘Doughnut Economics’ by Kate Raworth is a great read – I knew nothing about economics when I started reading, but it still made perfect sense. Raworth clearly and simply identifies the problems and offers achievable and sensible solutions. It really can work.

In a nutshell, our economy is broken because, while the wealth continues to flow and grow, there are huge numbers of ordinary people who cannot afford to provide for their most basic needs – even by working full time. They have fallen out of the model and cannot get back in.

Alongside this problem, our economics has overlooked two vital pieces of any economy – the ultimate source of wealth: the sun’s light and heat, and the ultimate destination of all our resources: the heat and waste we produce.

The doughnut economic model essentially illustrates the need for an outer boundary (where the icing is!) where nothing we do impacts our environment in an overall negative way. The hole in the middle is just that: it is the space where people do not have enough resources, not even to survive, let alone thrive. It is a hole because there should be no one living in that space! The ring between the ‘ecological ceiling’ and the ‘social foundation’ is the ‘doughnut’, or the ‘safe and just space’ where all should love – without fear and with enough. And our impact on the environment becomes positive.

Does it sound like a pipe dream?  Apparently, it isn’t! The city of Amsterdam was the first to adopt the model, launching it in 2020 – and they are finding it works, even through a pandemic. Several US cities have now adopted the model and it is popping up all over our country – even in Cambridge who now have a working group, the ‘Cambridge Doughnut’, https://cambridgedoughnut.org.uk/, investigating how the model could be implemented here.

It is simple. Everything we do in our homes, our businesses, and our social groups can be assessed using this little grid:

Local and global, social and ecological. Working together and joining in with a fabulous common aim.

During the Feast this year, let’s think about where we are already implementing doughnut principles and what we could easily change to put us firmly into the doughnut model. Let’s celebrate the way Covid19, for all its horrors, has enabled us to make unthinkable changes for the better – and how we can keep the momentum for positive transformation.

For more information, and inspiration, visit https://doughnuteconomics.org/

Rebecca Strivens, an ordinary person.